Behind the scenes: Cape Playhouse brings Maine show back to Cape Cod

Actor/writer John Cariani grew up in northern Maine, and set his best-known play there. But the current production of “Almost, Maine” at Cape Playhouse in Dennis is almost like bringing the script home.

Actor/writer John Cariani grew up in northern Maine, and set his best-known play there. But the current production of “Almost, Maine” at Cape Playhouse in Dennis is almost like bringing the script home.

“Almost, Maine” began when NBC was looking for post-“Friends” comedy and chose Cariani and some of his comic sketches for a showcase program, Cariani says in a phone interview. Director Gabriel Barre (“The Wild Party” off-Broadway) saw them, and worked with Cariani and an actress friend to go through a couple of dozen scripts. Barre chose several sketches, all set on a Friday night in the middle of winter in a small, northern Maine town, and told Cariani “this could be the beginning of something.”

It was. Andrew Polk, co-founder and then-artistic director of Cape Cod Theatre Project in Falmouth, chose Cariani's show for the 2002 season of developing plays through staged readings. The show, with Barre directing, then scored acclaim and box-office records in its 2004 premiere at Portland Stage Company in Cariani's native Maine. It was staged off-Broadway in 2006 – where it got a less-warm critical reception.

Disappointed, Cariani thought the play had faded away. Until, slowly, more and more theaters wanted to stage it.

There have now been more than 2,000 productions of “Almost, Maine” in the U.S. and it's been translated into 12 languages for international shows – making it, according to the show's website, one of the most frequently produced plays of the past decade.

Cariani still clearly marvels at the trajectory. “It's not at all how I imagined it would happen,” he says now. “What you imagine is not what the world is capable of giving you.”

“Almost, Maine” is set in a fictional rural town similar to the area near Presque Isle where Cariani grew up, 500 miles north of Boston, with Edmonton in Canada the closest city at a 45-minute drive away. That area is isolated and quiet enough, Cariani says, that people (as in his play) are “aware that human beings don't run the show … and weird stuff can happen.” It's also an area geographically and scientifically well-placed to see the Northern Lights, which he says can happen as frequently as every couple of weeks in his hometown and which figure into the setting for “Almost, Maine.”

The play's website describes the plot this way: “One cold, clear Friday night in the middle of winter, while the northern lights hover in the sky above, Almost's residents find themselves falling in and out of love in the strangest ways. Knees are bruised. Hearts are broken. Love is lost, found, and confounded.” The play's tagline is “It's love. But not quite.” And Cariani says the script addresses “the fleeting nature of comfort and happiness.”

While much of the popularity of the play has been with community, college and high school companies, more than 70 of the U.S. productions have been at professional theaters – and Cariani was thrilled with the production done at Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, New York. Geva also recently produced Cariani's “Last Gas,” and artistic director Mark Cuddy chose to bring back this “Almost, Maine” for the Cape Playhouse where he is also now producing. Cariani is grateful for Cuddy's support, and happy the show is happening on Cape Cod, a place he loves.

As a playwright, he calls himself “a traditionalist,” wanting “a good beginning, good climaxes and conflicts and a good, clear end. I rue the fact that a lot of theater is lazy in its storytelling. ... That may make me old-fashioned, but I believe in the power of a well-constructed story.”

Cariani acknowledges that some audience members might think his approach to playwriting is “square,” but says companies have to walk a fine line in presenting “Almost, Maine.”

“When it's done poorly, it's a sentimental comedy,” he says. “When it's done well, it's a romantic comedy. It's not corny if you do it right.”

The Geva production re-created at Cape Playhouse got that balance right, he says. And he's also been pleasantly surprised that even some high school productions have figured out the best approach. “I think kids get the play. I thought 'This is a play for adults, how can kids possibly get it?' But they're still very hopeful. They're young enough to not have that beaten out of them. They're just experiencing first pain and it's very acute.”

Cariani is chiefly an actor – TV audiences might recognize him as CSU Tech Julian Beck in the 2002-2007 seasons of “Law and Order” or Professor Otto Bahnoff in the 2009-10 season of CBS's “Numb3rs.” He won a Tony nomination and Outer Critics Circle Award as Motel the Tailor in 2004's “Fiddler on the Roof” revival and is now performing in “Dancing Lessons,” a new Mark St. Germain play (author of “Freud's Last Session,” seen earlier in the Cape Playhouse season) at Barrington Stage in Western Massachusetts. Cariani just played “a very scared zookeeper” in the horror film “Deliver Us From Evil” and a deputy in the independent film “Child of Grace.”

“I make my living as an actor. I write plays for the fun part,” he says. “I try to keep it fun for me, as a creative outlet.”

But despite the huge popularity of “Almost, Maine,” and productions this year of his newer “Last Gas” and “Love/Sick,” he still has a hard time talking about himself as a successful playwright.

“I started out as a failure. That stays in your head. You feel like you haven't arrived,” he says, citing very negative reviews of “Almost, Maine” in the New York Times and Boston Globe. But he acknowledges that with the success of “Almost, Maine,” he feels like he has “the last laugh.”

Cariani also is proving some theater critics wrong by giving back to other actors who want to write plays. “I hate it when critics say actors shouldn't be playwrights – they make the best playwrights,” Cariani says. “I think actors know plays better than anybody. We know when we feel an audience is with us and when they abandon us, we know why something works.”

Realizing he's been successful enough at least to make a difference, Cariani, at the encouragement of a friend, has since donated some “Almost, Maine” money to Cape Cod Theatre Project – where it all started – to help finance chances for actors to write plays. The playwright-in-residence programs there for the past couple of summers have happened because of Cariani.

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Any “Star Wars” fan has to smile when they hear the title of the third and final production of the season for New Classics Company in Hyannis: “I've Got A Bad Feeling About This.” And yes, the subtitle is “A Tribute to George Lucas.”

Brett Burkhardt, Matt Kohler and Justin Jay Gray – the three founders of the 2-year-old company – have together written the play, and it's about three friends working to create the ultimate tribute video to famed filmmaker Lucas. In the three-man show, the trio promises in a press release, “George Lucas' entire filmography is brought vividly and comedically to life onstage.”

The premise is that the video is being filmed in front of a live audience, so audience participation will be part of the show.

“Bad Feeling” grew out of character development that the New Classics writers had been exploring for last year's production of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's play “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged),” according to the release. Burkhardt, Kohler and Gray “fell in love with these exaggerated versions of themselves” and thought, “What would these characters do next?”

They're all Lucas fans, so they studied his work and used research and improv to create a two-hour script that ranges from the “Indiana Jones” movies to the “Star Wars” films, plus stretching into “American Graffiti” and “Howard the Duck.”

Provincetown multimedia artist Jay Critchley certainly might have the most controversial set of characters of the summer with his benefit staged reading Saturday of his experimental musical “Planet Snowvio.”

The political satire is about Edward Snowden, National Security Administration whistleblower, meeting Mario Savio of the historic Free Speech Movement. And on their way to Planet Snowvio, they meet President Obama and Vladimir Putin. Sprinkled within the show are humorous interpretations of classic pop songs, according to a press release.

The show is at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St., and the benefit is for the theater. The play was first presented in April at the University of California Art Museum in Berkeley. Critchley was inspired to write the show when he read the biography of Savio, whose movement helped to spark campus activisim and anti-Vietnam War protests, while following Snowden's revelations, the release says.

The reading's cast will include New York actors (now in Peregrine Theatre Company's “Rent” at the theater) Gabrielle Calixte as Savio and Solomon Peck as Snowden, with Provincetown actors Bragan Thomas (Putin) and Kevin Doherty (Obama). John Thomas will be musical director.

or more theater news, check out Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll's blog at www.capecodonline.com/stagedoor and follow KathiSDCCT on Twitter.